


for your steps alone

by portions_forfox



Category: Freaks and Geeks
Genre: F/F, the summer of the grateful dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 12:26:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something about the Grateful Dead experience has changed Kim, and it shows when she falls asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for your steps alone

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write this since I finished the show, and I finally got around to it. Hooray for me!

Nights, Kim falls asleep in Victor’s truck with her eyes dead closed and her mouth wide open, snores like a bulldog with a sinus problem and doesn’t budge an inch through the entire night. She can lie down in practically any position—her head in Lindsay’s lap, her head on Lindsay’s stomach, her head pressed into the crease of Lindsay’s forearm and bicep—and as long as she’s bothering Lindsay in some way even while unconscious, she’s comfortable. It’s not uncommon for Lindsay to wake up with blonde strands of hair in her eyes, or a dead weight hand with painted fingernails pressed to her teeth, or a floppy long arm draped across her chest. You’d expect her to scoff, groan, roll her eyes, shove Kim off of her so she’d wake up and get into a big fight, have Victor yell at them from the driver’s seat about the safe haven of the Grateful Dead Volkswagen bus and how petty fighting is the _last_ thing he’ll tolerate, but that never happens. Lindsay wishes she minded more than she does, but she doesn’t.

Something about the Grateful Dead experience has changed Kim, and it shows when she falls asleep. She’s always peaceful. She looks happy and dreams well. Lindsay knows that when this is all over Kim will go back to being the old Kim Kelly, cranky and loud and just an overall downright bitch, and she’s okay with that—no, actually? She’s _great_ with that. She misses that Kim a little.

But for now, Kim smiles at her an awful lot. And she’s okay with that, too.

 

 

Kim’s hands are steady on the shiny silver crank of Vic’s car door, handle glinting in the sun. She wrenches it open and disappears inside while Lindsay taps her foot on the dusty pavement, squints into the sun, and stares back impatiently at Kim’s ass wiggling with effort over the seatback.

“Could you hurry up?” she prods. “We’re gonna miss it.”

“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying, God!” Kim’s voice is muffled over the seatbacks and leather. “It’s you who _has_ to have your glowstick with you at all times.”

Lindsay checks the spot on her wrist where her watch would’ve been, if it hadn’t gotten smashed on a concert night in Indianapolis when Kim had held her wrist too tight and they’d danced too zealously in a group of too many zealous people and it had been awful and cramped and sweaty and beautiful. Afterward Lindsay had noticed the broken glass and whacked-out minute hand in the light of a hundred candles moving like a pilgrimage, like a river of prayers through the parking lot, and Laurie had touched her hand and said, “It’s okay, I promise. Time means nothing anyway,” and in that moment Lindsay had believed her.

“It’s not my fault you left them in the car,” Lindsay grumbles while the sun shifts in the sky, her eyes squinting harder into the light.

Kim’s face appears again and she holds up the glowsticks. “There,” she says. “Happy?”

Lindsay goes to swipe one out of Kim’s hand but Kim yanks them away at the last second, sliding legs-first out of the van until her feet hit the pavement. “Ah-ah-ah!” she chastens, slamming the brightly colored door behind her with a grunt of muscle. “I get to carry them back.”

Lindsay slumps, and they start off toward the field, the distant sounds of guitar chords and broken voices, crowds cheering and crying and laughing all as one. All of it out over the hilltop, just a little ways off.

“But what if you drop one?” Lindsay questions.

“Then I’ll pick it up,” Lindsay answers, “duh?”

“What if you don’t notice that you’ve dropped it?”

“I’d notice.”

“How do you know?”

“Lindsay, _God_ ,” Kim groans, and stops short, standing like a wall in front of Lindsay. “You have _got_ to stop worrying so much.”

“I’m not worried,” Lindsay assures her, trying to look . . . not-worried. “I’m great, I’m fine, I’m . . . good to go.” She drags the toe of her boot through the dusty ground in some loop or curved design and then looks up at Kim, who’s got that look on her face she gives Daniel after he’s said something really stupid. Which is a lot. A lot of the time.

Then Kim’s expression shifts and a smile breaks out across her lips, her teeth—she rolls her eyes good-naturedly and starts walking again, slapping a glowstick into Lindsay’s palm and shaking her head, laughing.

“God, you’re such a goof,” she says, and once the glowstick’s in Lindsay’s palm she doesn’t move her hand, just keeps her warm, slightly sweaty palm in Lindsay’s grasp and swings their arms, back and forth, back and forth. The music fades out over the hilltop and Lindsay jerks her head up in surprise to look at Kim through the hard-red setting sun and the dust and the grime and the dirty blonde curtain of hair falling across the side of Kim’s face, flowers behind her ears, denim all over, but Kim’s not paying attention.

The song ends and in the distance applause ripples like water across the open hillside, but Kim keeps holding on.

 

 

“Remember,” Kim says one night in a fireside circle, “when we first met?”

They’ve joined up with some other fans after the concert, a motley crew of students and musicians and runaways all curled around a bonfire built on cereal boxes and wayside twigs, laughter, singing, conversation. Lindsay initially thought Vic and Laurie knew them somehow from their last Grateful Dead getaway, the familiarity and the warmth so strong and vital, but as the night wore on she found out with the sort of easy, soft revelation of math or poetry that these were strangers—or had been, anyway. Not anymore.

“Yeah,” Lindsay answers, twirling her stick with a marshmallow closer to the embers—Kim’s way of roasting marshmallows was to go all in, ‘light that fucker on fire,’ and eat it burnt and impatient. Lindsay, not so much. She takes her time. “We hated each other,” Lindsay adds, and she smirks a little, sideways.

Beside them Vic and Laurie are laughing, listening to a story about a friend of a friend of a friend who met Jerry once, the childlike glee and wonder of it all. Across the circle a couple of college kids on summer vacation are wrapped arm in arm singing _it’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, perhaps they’re better left unsung_ , and Kim is sitting sideways facing Lindsay, her palms resting behind her in the grass and a flickering orange gleam lighting up her face.

“No, _I_ hated _you_ ,” Kim corrects her. “You were totally desperate to be my friend.”

“I was not!” Lindsay insists, then clears her throat—hates how she can sound like a petulant child sometimes. Too much hanging around Sam, she thinks. “You were a total dick to my little brother, so.”

“Oh come on,” Kim rolls her eyes, her head falling back between her shoulder blades in the picture of annoyance. “ _Everyone_ is a dick to your little brother. Abusing him and his little geek friends is like, common practice.”

“So?” Lindsay mumbles, her shoulders hunching. She’s got her grandpa’s green army jacket loose about her shoulders, and she won’t take it off. “That doesn’t make it okay.”

Kim’s eyes flick up and down a couple times, surveying Lindsay’s slouch in silent observation. “Anyway,” she groans, finally, “I think you were just jealous. You had a little crush on Daniel, remember?” Lindsay doesn’t answer. “. . . But that wore off.”

It’s a moment, filled with snippets of other conversations and uncaught song lyrics and silence between the two of them, until Lindsay cracks a smile, small and inconspicuous in the firelight.

“Remind me why we’re friends again?” she says.

“Because,” Kim answers, and she curls her knees into her chest and bops Lindsay’s nose with her forefinger. “I grew on you.”

“Yeah,” Lindsay laughs, pulling her marshmallow in from the fire and starting to blow on it, cautious. “Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

 

 

They’re walking back to the car arm in arm on a music high, one or two in the morning with Vic and Laurie and the others trailing behind them voices rising into song, when Lindsay leans into Kim’s denim stride and says, “What a _bout_ Daniel?”

Kim’s face clouds over. She stiffens.

“Yeah,” she shrugs, cold. “What about him.”

 

 

Vic drives through the night so they can hit Denver by morning, and Lindsay falls asleep with her head on Kim’s shoulder, Kim’s head resting on her own. She wakes up for just a moment somewhere in the middle of South Dakota to the sound of Laurie’s voice soothing Vic in the passenger seat, soft and careful and devoted. Kim is still asleep, breathing heavily.

The Volkswagen bumps and rolls, and Lindsay watches the road fade out behind them, in reverse, in reverse, in reverse. Watching the dotted white lines fall backwards, never-ending. Feeling the heavy box weight of a thousand things she left behind tumbling out of the trunk of the car. She hasn’t thought about Nick in months, almost—this feels like a different life, a new one.

Kim wakes on her own, a rare occurrence. She sucks her lip in, sits up and lifts her head off Lindsay’s shoulder.

“Where are we?” she asks, and looks at Lindsay, sleep-hazed. Her face is awash in blue from the lights of the road at night, eyelids heavy with sleep and a cowlick of pale hair sticking up at the crown of her head.

“I don’t know,” Lindsay tells her. Then, “Does it matter?”

Kim must notice something in Lindsay’s face, because when she makes eye contact she blinks a couple of times, opens her mouth and says, “Lindsay,” just that, real soft. And her hand lands on Lindsay’s sleeve, where her forearm meets her bicep.

Lindsay kisses her then, her hands sliding up to Kim’s neck and then into Kim’s hair, the hushing sound of Kim’s blue gortex coat bending backwards as she presses her tongue into Lindsay’s mouth, and her hands beneath Lindsay’s jacket, warm and cold and trembling all at once.

Her fingers meet the skin of Lindsay’s stomach and Lindsay gasps, softly, her lips pulling away from Kim’s for a moment. Her breath is heavy; Kim’s too.

“Sh,” Kim presses a finger to her lips. “We have to be quiet.” And she chuckles softly into the air while she tucks her hands beneath Lindsay’s beltline, and Lindsay realizes just then she hasn’t thought about anyone but Kim in a long, long time.

 

 

Laurie falls asleep in the passenger seat and it’s just Vic driving for miles and miles, _American Beauty_ in the tape player and Jerry’s slow voice muffled over the seatbacks, hitting them in waves like they’re floating down a river. Lindsay’s curled into Kim’s chest, and Kim’s got her long arms around her, her giant, noisy Gortex coat, too. 

Lindsay shifts closer, says, “Kim?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think it’ll be different when we get back?”

Kim just smiles, her eyes closed tight. She pulls Lindsay closer, whispers, “Absolutely.”

In the front seat Vic is singing— _If I knew the way, I would take you home._


End file.
